No Daylight Savings Fix This Year?

An iOS 4.1 bug that causes alarms to be one hour off after the "Summer" or "Daylight Savings" time switch hit European users this weekend. The same bug affected New Zealand and Australian iOS users last month, as those countries went on Daylight Savings for the austral summer. At the time, Apple Australia indicated that the bug fix would be released soon, but it appears that we'll be waiting for iOS 4.2 in November... after the entire world has changed its clocks.

Specifically, the bug affects alarms set using the iOS 4.1 Clock app: recurring alarms set to repeat for anything other than "every day" will fail to make the shift between summer and regular time. For New Zealand (which made the shift to Daylight Savings Time on September 27) and most of Australia (which followed on October 3), this was a nuisance for people who use their iDevices as alarm clocks, as they were awakened an hour early. For users in the Northern Hemisphere, whose clocks "Fall back" in autumn, this means that alarms will be an hour late, which is potentially a more serious problem.

Apple has indicated that it's aware of the problem and has a fix in the queue, but it's surprising that they chose not to get the patch out for the millions of iPhone users in Europe, and it'll even more surprising if they are waiting until after the many more millions of US users set their clocks back. It's still possible that we'll see an interim release to fix the alarm bug and the lockscreen issue this week, but anyone in the US who relies on their iPhone to wake them up should have a backup in place next Monday.